Applying for credit many times within a short period can hurt your credit score. When you apply for any type of credit (such as an auto loan, credit card, department store card, or mortgage), the lender considering your credit application checks your credit history. This is recorded in your credit report as a "hard inquiry." Although inquiries are an unavoidable result of applying for credit, lenders dislike seeing many within a short period (such as 6 months). This is because they do not know whether you are "shopping" for the best offer, or if you are desperately trying to get credit because of financial trouble.

How do you shop for the best credit card, auto loan, etc without having to pull your credit score? This makes it a bit hard to get the best deal. Anyone have a way around it? I don't need anything now, but I know someday I will.

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How do you shop for the best credit card, auto loan, etc without having to pull your credit score? This makes it a bit hard to get the best deal. Anyone have a way around it? I don't need anything now, but I know someday I will.

One way to save time is to shop the military businesses first-- USAA, NFCU (which just opened their rolls to the Army & Air Force) and PenFed have very attractive offers.

Another way is to read a lot of Bankrate.com articles on credit cards. They occasionally run an article that compares 20-30 cards with various parameters to help people choose the best deal.

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